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In September 2017, the chairman and the president of Shanghai Shine-Link International Logistics Co. Ltd. were considering their company’s future. The company was established in May 2001. After more than 16 years of rapid development, it became a leading information technology empowered logistics provider, offering high value-added services, with the lean management and innovation capabilities of modern logistics enterprises. In September 2017, it was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange main board. The management team had to reconsider the company’s next steps for growth. The two men realized it was time to convene the board of directors to consider the company’s future. With so many opportunities and risks in front of them, good decision-making was essential to their prospects.

Organic Wellness Products Private Limited (Organic Wellness) was founded in 2015 with the aim to create a sustainable venture for organic products that would boost agricultural entrepreneurship and benefit society by generating rural employment and value creation. By May 2018, Organic Wellness’s market had grown considerably, and the company was exporting to 27 countries around the world and had a pan-Indian presence. While its innovative marketing strategy—free of big spending—had worked well for the organization, the founder needed to decide if he would continue with the same style of cause-related marketing, or whether it was time to invest in marketing channels to create better consumer outreach.

In 2018, the Singapore-based telecommunication operator StarHub Ltd. (StarHub) acknowledged that in 2017 its total revenue was relatively flat and its net profit had declined. In the face of rising competition and a slowing global economy, the company needed to explore new sources of revenue growth. Two areas of growth seemed promising. The first area involved the launch of StarHub's smart retail analytics for small and medium enterprises in the retail food and beverages industry, which had been experiencing a high churn rate. The second area would apply StarHub's new robotics and automation solutions in the labour-intensive hospitality industry, which suffered from an oversupply of properties and would likely see exits and consolidation. StarHub needed to choose between the two investment options.

Zydus Wellness Ltd. (Zydus), based in Ahmedabad, India, operated in the consumer goods sector, offering health and hygiene products and brands such as Sugar Free, Everyuth, Actilife, and Nutralite. Zydus promoted its Nutralite margarine brand mainly through television advertising. Its other communication strategies included digital marketing efforts and on-ground activities. Entering a market that was primarily dominated by Amul butter, Nutralite positioned itself in its marketing communications as a healthier alternative to butter. With Amul, Nutralite faced a strong legacy and brand loyalty, which Amul had created in the market over the years. Market research indicated that consumers were uncertain about what kind of product Nutralite was. At the end of 2017, the head of marketing at Zydus faced several challenging questions: How should the brand establish its identity? Having existed in the market for more than a decade, should Nutralite now promise something more than health? Finally, how could the company convert this transactional relationship with its consumers and strengthen its market share?

On May 27, 2018, Maryanne Trollope, the Learning and Development (L&D) manager for Anglo American South Africa, was considering her dilemma of handing over her brainchild to her successor. The Building Leaders and Shaping Talent (BLAST) program was a flagship talent management program for young graduates in South Africa, and she wanted to ensure a smooth transition for her successor and to ensure that the BLASTers (BLAST recruits) developed relationships with her replacement. Trollope was meeting with one BLASTer, who had been on an international BLAST placement in London, England. She had to decide when to introduce this recruit to the individual taking over the program and what information and insight she should recommend the recruit share with her colleague. What were the critical success factors of the talent management program, and how could Trollope ensure sustained success and a smooth handover process?

In July 2018, MICA, Ahmedabad, one of the leading management institutions in India, was experiencing bottlenecks in its dining hall that were delaying regular operations during peak lunch hours. The lunch break was for about 75 minutes between classes. The dining hall catered to 480 people at any given time—not only students but also faculty members and other MICA staff. After eating lunch at the dining hall, many students had to rush to post-lunch class sessions, and they risked missing attendance. Most faculty members had zero tolerance for late entrants. A MICA faculty member from the business management area was entrusted with studying the situation, determining the cause for delay, and proposing remedial measures. He needed to identify the weakest link in the chain and then propose an infusion of resources that would buffer this constraint, thereby reducing the total time students and other members of the MICA community spent in the dining hall during lunch hours.

In April 2017, Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd., in Hyderabad, India, was experiencing a rapid growth in demand and needed to find ways to expand its capacity to meet this demand without significantly increasing costs. The company created innovative teaching and learning products for students in grades 1 through 10. Working with these products hands-on helped students understand various mathematics and science concepts such as magnetism, light, and sound. The founder and chief executive officer asked the head of production and stores to evaluate the company’s existing production processes and capacity and to suggest options for improvement at a senior management meeting, scheduled for a week later.

An executive at a North American-based multinational company contacted an old friend and former business associate in Indonesia in hopes of collaborating with him to purchase Asian software companies. After several emails, the two disagreed and disengaged. The North American declined the Indonesian’s advice to invest time in developing the relationships required to access this market. Three months later, after realizing he had closed the door on a huge and growing market, the North American again contacted his Indonesian associate. He realized that his North American style of negotiation was ineffective in this market and that the Asians had their own preferred approach. He planned a phone call to Indonesia to try to restart the process. What style of communication should he use this time in an effort to generate a better understanding and success?

On April 30, 2018, the athletic director of Grand River University was drafting a plan for his department to be reviewed by the school’s board of trustees. Grand River University was a small university supporting several varsity sports teams that competed regionally and nationally. The men’s hockey, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball programs had struggled in recent years. In fact, the women’s hockey program had been cut several years earlier. The school wanted to reduce the athletics program’s dependence on grants. With the university facing increasing costs and stagnant revenue, the athletic director had to provide information that clearly outlined the cost to the school of each program and athlete. A group of researchers had used activity-based costing to show that the actual cost of having a team was much higher than schools had reported. The athletic director wondered what his school’s costs would look like after applying that method to his calculations.

Sandu Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (Sandu Pharmaceuticals) was a publicly listed company operating in the pharmaceuticals and health care sector. It manufactured Ayurvedic medicines. Incorporated in 1985, the company traced its history back over more than a century. The third generation was at the helm of the firm in September 2016. The company’s director, was thinking about how previous successive generations in the family had handled the challenge of absorbing family members into the business, and in particular about whether he was doing enough to prepare the next generation to take over a business that was bound to grow more rapidly in the future, given the growing concern worldwide about the cost of allopathic health care and demand for less invasive and more holistic treatments.

On April 2, 2017, the chairman of Kamat Hotels (India) Limited (KHIL) and his son, the company’s chief executive officer, were having breakfast and recalling tough times endured in 2014 after a failed corporate debt restructuring. It had been one of the most important decisions ever made by the public sector undertaking bank—leaving their previous joint lenders and deciding to assign the loan to an asset reconstruction company. The incident had proven to be a turning point for the company. The failure of the corporate debt restructuring mechanism had become an unexpected advantage, and the company never looked back. The two leaders were now focused on their commitment to grow the company in a sustained manner, staying true to the local environmental challenges. With the goal of aggressive growth in several Indian states, the chief executive officer was looking for more hotels to own, manage, or lease in the mid to high segments of the market as an expansion plan. His vision was to someday retire as the owner of one of India’s largest hotel assets and to take his family name forward to the next benchmark of Indian hospitality. Was this the best path forward for KHIL?

Ofo (stylized “ofo”), a Beijing-based bicycle-sharing company, had grown bicycle sharing from nothing into a dockless mobile application (app) service industry with over 120 million monthly active users sharing 30 million bicycles in cities across China and around the world. Founded by five bicycle enthusiasts in 2014, its dockless system used a smartphone application to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging an hourly rate for use. Although only two years old in 2017—and yet to turn a profit—the company was valued at over USD 1 billion in a recent E round of private-equity financing. ofo’s new funds would be used to buy bicycles for international expansion and hire more talent, but in a rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, the company needed to assess its current and future position.

In July 2016, in Philadelphia, a group of aspiring entrepreneurs had developed a proof-of-concept prototype for the Drinks-Up! mobile drinks-ordering app, a digital innovation designed to provide a better bar experience. The team had received an investment proposal that included a plan for app development and a partnership opportunity from the potential investor’s company, and they were facing an investment decision: Was an agreement that would see the investor develop the app the right option to develop Drinks-Up!? If not, how much time and sweat equity was this really going to take? Was Drinks-Up! truly a disruptive innovation that was worth the risk?

The backwaters of Vembanad, in Kerala, India, were a renowned tourist attraction, known for their beautiful waters, schools of fish, and the people who lived along the shores. However, the exploitation of resources had taken a toll on the lake and its ecosystem. Pollution and the decline of the rich fish population had left the community impoverished. In 2008, the non-profit social enterprise Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) had launched an innovative educational and self-regulatory program that had begun to improve the ecosystem. However, by 2018, the resurgence of the fish population had also attracted a fisheries-based food company that wanted to begin processing and exporting fish caught in Vembanad. The immediate employment benefits were attractive to the impoverished local fishers, but the long-term consequences for the region and its community were severe. How should ATREE respond to this pending crisis? Should ATREE use incoming money for immediate relief for Vembanad’s stakeholders or should it use the money for long-term benefit by focusing on further conservation efforts?

In 2018, Restaurant Kazu was operating at near full capacity with long waiting lines. Located in a mixed, high-density neighbourhood in the west end of downtown Montreal, Quebec, the full-service restaurant had been popular with patrons since its opening eight years earlier. However, the owner and chef wondered if he should address the issue of long waiting lines, which could discourage potential customers. If so, what measures could he take to improve the situation, and how cost effective would the measures be? With the start of the peak season only two weeks away, the owner had to make some quick decisions.

In June 2017, executives from Amalsad Vibhag Vividh Karyakari Sahakari Khedut Mandali Ltd. (Amalsad Cooperative) met to consider possible changes to the cooperative’s interventions in commodity marketing, particularly, whether further interventions would benefit member farmers. Linking a unique reward and penalty scheme to the grade supplied by the farmers and directly supplying produce to the terminal market in Delhi had resulted in a 15 per cent increase in the farmers’ income. Streamlining the entire process—from receiving the commodity, grading and sorting the supply, to paying the farmers—had considerably reduced delays. The chairperson of the Amalsad Cooperative, which covered farmers from 17 villages near the town of Amalsad, in India, was pleased that reengineering the commodity marketing process had not only fetched a better price but had also eliminated the inefficiencies associated with marketing through the traditional channel—the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee trading yards, or mandies. However, he wondered whether further refining the grades would enhance the income of the members and asked his executives what other processes could be modified to benefit the members, especially in rendering services.

In 2014, the vice-president of Group Corporate Social Responsibility at Singtel, a Singapore-based provider of telecommunications products and services, was scrutinizing his proposal for the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) transformation. He wanted to reposition Singtel's CSR approach to create greater social impact while demonstrating greater benefit to the company beyond promoting its branding and reputation. In doing so, he was mindful that the proposal would require greater financial investment on the part of the company. The proposal would also need to leverage the company's capabilities and partnerships and address the possibility of dropping its current beneficiaries. His team needed to convince the board of directors and senior management that the potential benefits of the proposed changes would be worth the financial investment and the possibility of reduced brand exposure.

In August 2018, the managing director of Grace Castings Ltd. (GCL) was preparing for an upcoming board meeting. At the meeting, which was expected to take place at the company’s head office in Ahmedabad, India, he planned to present the strategic plan for GCL’s future expansion as well as chart the company’s direction. GLC was a small mill that manufactured steel products, including structural bars, thermomechanically treated bars, angles, and channels. In fiscal year 2017–18, the fully family-owned business had a financial turnover of US$33.85 million. With the recent growth in India’s steel industry, the managing director was considering various options for expansion. The first option was backward integration, which meant increasing the capacity of billet manufacturing by adding a 30-metric-ton induction furnace. The second option was to expand the business by adding a new power plant. The managing director had to decide whether to recommend one or both of these options or simply maintain the status quo and grow the company at a slow pace.

Job-search site iimjobs.com had evolved in the Indian recruitment landscape as one of the major players for premium jobs, spanning across mid-management and leadership roles, and across multiple industries. In January 2018, leveraging the database of job posts and resumes on its site, the company launched Calculus, a platform built using advanced talent analytics, to provide holistic and integrated talent management solutions. At the same time, market trends led the company to consider diversification into non-premium domains. The industry continued to grapple with the challenges of identifying critical talent to sustain growth plans, and talent management strategists were unable to base decisions on live, dynamic data points. However, the founder and chief executive officer of iimjobs.com faced several core concerns—the strategic implications of diversification into a non-premium job market and the expectations of the industry from a talent analytics platform. He looked at the talent analytics solutions provided by Calculus and considered: How far can the analytic solutions offered by Calculus meet modern human resources holistic requirements?

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being the search engine that doesn’t track you, and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.